When Target thought ahead about the headlines they would make with the launch of a limited partnership with designer Missoni, it probably didn’t expect this one:
“Demand at Target for fashion line crashes web site”
While we usually hear about retail Website crashes on or near Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Target.com’s recent site outage is remarkable for its atypical timing, severity and length. Careful investigation into the origins and impact of the incident reveal important lessons for all online retailers. Ultimately, failing to properly prepare for an incident like this is no option for merchants striving for success in today’s connected consumer market.
What Happened?
Keynote Systems' measurements of the target.com website indicated that traffic began overwhelming Target.com around 8:00am EDT. The intense wave of traffic initially resulted in server errors. Quickly, the operations team responded by serving “friendly” error messages around 8:14am. After that, only about 7% of the visitors were able to successfully reach the real home page throughout the remainder of the day. “Fail puppy” error pages were still being measured by Keynote well into the following day.
(click image for larger version)
Fallout
Credit the marketing and merchandising teams for generating the hype the drove the demand for Misonni. Were their efforts wasted when Target.com went sideways for two days? A better question might be what destruction did they wreak on sales as a whole during that time?
What drives the financial impact of a site outage or performance issues is abandonment. It’s important to understand that visitors experiencing a Website with issues don’t result in lost revenue, per se. Only when those visitors don’t return, and/or go somewhere else is revenue lost. A shopper’s tolerance for errors is called “tenacity” in Web load testing parlance. Low tenacity shoppers bail from slow searches and hanging shopping carts in a dash. Missoni brandistas, however, were very high tenacity shoppers. They kept trying to buy despite the errors, which also likely contributed to the outage’s long duration.
So while Target’s outage surely didn’t deter some of the Missoni faithful from eventually returning to place orders on another day, the real financial impact was to the other product category sales that couldn’t take place during that time. The iPad shopper went to one of Target’s competitors, instead. According to Nielsen NetRatings, for every 1000 consumer electronics shoppers that experience three errors, the cost to the site is nearly $100,000. The Target.com site gets 1.3 million visitors a day this time of year, and it presented repeated errors to 93% of visitors on Tuesday. You can start to get a sense of how that adds up!
(click image for larger version)
Realistic Web Load Testing Prevents Outages
The only way to prevent events like this from happening is to perform realistic Web load tests that prepare for these scenarios. In this case, Target claims to have prepared for the kind of traffic they typically experience on Black Friday—a build-up over the course of the day. Clearly, this was not the realistic scenario to prepare for. The Missoni line went available at a certain time and day, more akin to a ticketing merchant where a concert sells out within minutes of its availability. They did not expect the suddenness of the demand surge.
If a load test had been run that adquately modeled the impact of the planned launch, the damage would have been done outside business hours and Target management would have been able to decide whether to make changes to their systems and retest, postpone or restructure the launch or just "risk it" and see what happens. We don't really think they ever had the chance to make those decisions. Surely they didn't conduct a load test that predicted such an epic fail. But should they have?
Realistic Web load tests model site usage and shopper behavior. Systems are deployed to simulate high levels of demand from multiple geographically disperse areas. Once the load is generated, the infrastructure and application’s response are watched carefully to identify bottlenecks and breakage points as the entire mesh of the Website’s interconnecting parts are stressed. Only this level of testing can accurately inform e-commerce teams of their preparation adequacy.
Comments